ORU Helps Attract Business to Oklahoma
Just weeks after ORU introduced its new supercomputer, Titan, a multi-disciplinary
team of ORU students and faculty were putting it to the test by providing critical
data to attract business to the State of Oklahoma.
Thanks to Dr. Ardith Baker, Assistant Chair of Business; Dr. Andrew Lang, Chair of
Computing and Mathematics; Jane Malcolm, Assistant Director of ORU’s Library; and
Dr. Jonathan Wiley, Assistant Professor of Finance, ORU recently collaborated with
Oklahoma’s Department of Commerce to provide data on what companies would be most
likely to set up shop in the state. Dr. Lang recruited a few of his mathematics and
finance undergraduate research assistants to help.
“I have been doing data science research with Dr. Lang for a few semesters to gain
more exposure to the world of data analysis,” said Brandon Jaquis, a 2019 graduate
from the College of Business. “I really owe it all to Dr. Lang for setting up this
opportunity to get real-life, hands-on experience.”
That hands-on experience included trying to sift through the U.S. Businesses Database
containing 15 million businesses and then try to narrow that down to the top 100 that
the state could consider recruiting. It clearly became a job for Titan, which has
more than 1300 physical, high-performance computing cores and can perform 45 trillion
calculations per second.
“We fed Titan a list of assumptions regarding the characteristics we preferred in
target companies,” said Jaquis. “Titan then returned a list of over 1900 companies
that are strong candidates for relocation or expansion into Oklahoma.”
Not only did Titan identify the best businesses, it also used artificial intelligence
to score and cluster the companies on that list based on the most important variables.
It identified companies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, and New York
that already have strong or supporting industries in Oklahoma such as aerospace and
IT.
At the end of the semester, three students including Jaquis presented their findings
to Oklahoma’s Secretary of Commerce and Workforce Development, Sean Kouplen, and the
state’s Secretary of Budget, Mike Mazzei.
“Part of the experience of doing real-life projects is the collaboration among students,
faculty, and project sponsors and the presentation of the findings to the project
sponsors. This emphasizes the importance of professionalism in business,” said Dr.
Baker.
And that professionalism paid off according to a post Kouplen shared on Facebook.
“This is how you become a Top 10 state,” wrote Kouplen. “Three outstanding Oral Roberts
University students, Brandon Jaquis, Caleb Mazzei and Isaak Thompson, spent four months
using ORU’s supercomputer to identify companies that are most likely to move or expand
in Oklahoma. Their findings were amazing!”
Dr. Lang says the work ORU can accomplish through Titan will reach far beyond Oklahoma.
“Having my data science undergraduate research students work in an open government
environment to solve real-life problems is an invaluable part of my students’ undergraduate
education,” said Lang. “With the addition of Titan, all ORU research groups now have
the ability to collaborate on some big problems with organizations all over the world.
It really sets ORU apart from other institutions.”